“The silver linings of adapting to change” by Professor Julie Parkes

This week I want to focus on how we have adapted to change and some of the unexpected silver linings to the COVID cloud that has enveloped us over the last 10 months. We have been so agile and effective in adapting to the ‘new normal’ – refocusing work and managing homelife under new rules and guidance. But our goal remains the same – improving people’s health. Of course, this has not been easy, but I have been so very impressed by how everyone has risen to the challenge leading to the emergence of many positives.

I would like to illustrate this with some examples within the School of Primary Care, Population Sciences and Medical Education (PPM).

Medical Education has worked quickly to respond to the challenges of teaching in a pandemic, sharing their expertise in online wizardry to provide student lectures, seminars and tutorials. Importantly they have taken exceptional care to ensure our students receive excellent pastoral as well as educational support – a silver lining.

The rapidly assembled COVID 19 research streams embody very high-quality applied health research. With many people going the extra mile to set-up studies in record time.

Examples include:

• Primary Care Research Centre’s ‘Germ Defence’, a website offering advice on how to avoid transmitting COVID-19 within the home, adopted by Gov.uk in the national Stay at Home guidance
• A trial of home-based nebulised interferon-gamma in people aged >65, or >50 with comorbidities;
• A cohort study across three UK databases  quantifying the association between COVID-19, ethnicity and mortality.
• Public Health colleagues being in the forefront of supporting COVID testing pilots in Southampton;
• Working with Occupational Health in UHSFT, to provide a weekly digest of appraised evidence to inform the health and safety of the NHS workforce, 
• Leading large national surveillance studies of COVID in prisons. 
• Raising awareness of “Long COVID” as an outcome of SARS-Cov-2 infection. This work has focussed the public, policy makers and funders on this important problem.   

PPM has amazing people working collaboratively and at pace to deliver research that is benefiting individual patients and the population – another silver lining.

This month our annual away-day was conducted virtually in an afternoon. We learnt “virtual world” skills such as small-groups on Teams; the joy of transapparating between  groups;  use of padlets to share ideas; but most of all we were reminded of the joy of learning from one another, benefiting from support freely offered and that kindness and care can make things seem a bit better (more silver linings).  

We all miss the office – not sitting at our computers (hopefully you can access a machine at home) but the human contact- informal exchanges, sharing problems and advice, and the pleasure of chatting about Strictly or boxset binges!

In the face of adversity we continue to deliver excellent education and research, but we have also managed to invigorate the connections that link us and recall the value of shared purpose and that kindness can help us meet challenges that may seem overwhelming. As Abraham Lincoln quoted “This too will pass” and when this does, I am confident that the silver linings will illuminate our Faculty and help us make it an even more supportive and productive organisation.